In The Zone With Martina Hingis

To distill the experience of The Zone to a single sentence, one could say this: The imagined becoming reality.

To play a match in which virtually you can execute any shot imaginable requires innumerable hours of practice and dedication. It also requires a willingness to labor through scores of matches where you can only execute most, or maybe just some of your desires on court.

A pair of recurring themes in most Zone-like performances, though, are 1) familiarity, 2) favorability, and 3) motivation.

Pete Sampras turned in his best performance of his career in the 1999 finals of Wimbledon, against Andre Agassi. He played Agassi 23 times prior to this (winning 13 of them) on grass, a surface that favored him. As Agassi was about to overtake him at No. 1, Sampras was motivated to prove his dominance.

The two most awe-inspiring results of Roger Federer’s career were at the 2004 US Open final and the semis of the 2007 Australian Open. In both cases, his opponents, Lleyton Hewitt and Andy Roddick, had no surprises for him in their approach. Their game plans suited his approach because their strengths were only fragments of his whole arsenal; yet they were unambiguous in their desire to overtake him, thus providing him the motivation he needed. 

For Martina Hingis, perfect conditions intersected the 1997 US Open final. Her opponent was 17-year-old Venus Williams, who had won all of her first six matches at the Open to reach her first Grand Slam final.

New as she was to the tour, Williams was still somewhat familiar to Hingis, who’d beaten her twice earlier in the year. Though the Swiss Miss had won two of the year’s previous three majors and was the undisputed No. 1, seeing a rising raw talent of an age similar to hers surely motivated Hingis to bring her best game.

But what about favorability? In retrospect, we all know that one day Venus, her sister Serena, and a few others would overpower Hingis, evicting her from the top spot and eventually driving her from the game.

In 1997, however, young Venus Williams was the most favorable of opponents for the young Swiss. She encountered variations of the same approach from the lumbering Lindsay Davenport and the erratic Mary Pierce, and had shown little difficulty in dispatching them due to their lack of variety.

“(Williams) plays the game I like: She tries to keep the ball in play,” Hingis was quoted as saying by Sports Illustrated. "That's too dangerous if you play me.”

While they all hit harder than her, they had not a fraction of her court sense, her placement, and her ability to deflect an opponent’s pace to her advantage. In the case of Davenport and Pierce, she was also much superior in court coverage.

The supremely athletic Williams could have presented a unique challenge for Hingis in that she had more outright speed than the Swiss, but once play began it was apparent that she was still the pupil, and Hingis the young professor.

The Swiss didn’t hit harder; she hit earlier, especially on service returns, surprising her opponent.

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